What type of network design should be used for my game?

Question

Okay, so I am trying to design a multiplayer only game. Here is the gist of my multiplayer gameplay structure,

• When a player starts up the game and clicks Play, he will be send to a map with 7 other players (i.e only total 8 players per map) who also just started the game like him.
• It's basically like a deathmatch round. The last man standing is the winner.
• The winner of the map will be transferred to another map which will consist of 7 other players like him who won their previous matches. Note, the 7 losers of a match will be bought back to the main menu. When they click Play, they will start from the case mentioned in my first point.
• And for the winners they will continue to play against winners from different maps.

So, my question is how to implement this network? Do I just need one main server? I am new to this so sorry if this question is very crude or stupid. Note, I just need a very high level network design considerations and suggestions.

Answer 1

There are essentially two ways to do this.

1. A dedicated gameserver all the players connect to. Someone needs run the gameserver(s) in a datacenter. That someone might be you or volunteers from the player community.
2. Peer-to-peer networking. One player is acting as the server, others act as clients. This has the advantage that nobody needs to pay for hosting the gameservers (although you might still need to pay for a global matchmaking server to allow players to find each other). The disadvantages are that players might not have internet connections as good as a dedicated server, and that you have a lot more technical challenges to solve, like NAT punchthrough for players behind routers or host transfer if the host leaves the game. It might also be difficult to prevent the host from cheating.